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As thrilled as I am about this years’ Best Translated Book Award longlist – and I am very thrilled — I was surprised that nothing from NYRB Classics showed up. After all, last year they published the winning book. Then again, in 2010, Melville House published the winning book and was not on the list in 2011. I’m certainly not suggesting any trend, and I say the more publishers recognized for publishing quality literature in translation the better. But, in its absence, I thought I’d look at another book that NYRB Classics published a couple of years ago: Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (Sommarboken, 1972; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 1974). Last year’s BTBA winning book was, by the way, Tove Jannson’s The True Deceiver, which was also translated by Thomas Teal (my review here).
This is perhaps one of the most serene books I have ever read, which is a bit strange since there is so much turbulence under the surface. The book takes place during one particular summer where each day may be slow but is also filled with life. The young child Sophia is spending the summer with her grandmother on an island in the Gulf of Finland. Sophia is just young enough that this is one of the first summers during which she is awake.
I’d say it’s the perfect primer for spring if you, like me, get antsy for warm weather at this time of year. As Sophia and her grandmother explore the island and enjoy watching the evening approach, followed by night, I couldn’t help but recall such peaceful days. The community, though dispersed across the island, is relatively close knit. They go through the seasons and the storms together.
Despite this, anyone else, including Sophia’s nearly absent father, feel like outsiders when they interact with Sophia and her grandmother. There is one episode in the book where a poor girl comes to visit, and she’s neither from the island nor part of Sophia and Grandmother’s circle. Jansson reminds us, “An island can be dreadful for someone from the outside.” There’s genuine darkness to this episode, but Jansson lightens it a little bit:
On the third day, Sophia came into the guest room and said, “Well, that does it. She’s impossible. I got her to dive, but it didn’t help.”
“Did she really dive?” Grandmother asked.
“Yes, really. I gave her a shove and she dived.”
“Oh,” Grandmother said. “And then what?”
“Her hair can’t take salt water,” explained Sophia sadly. “It looks awful. And it was her hair I liked.”
Burried even deeper in the book is lurking death. Sophia is just waking up to life, but her grandmother is descending, more and more without caring, to death, and Sophia just about comprehends this. This is accentuated once in the book when, in a passage so brief you just might miss it, Sophia wakes up and remembers “she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.” The absence of her mother, the presence of death, pervade even the most peaceful passages, giving everything multiple tones and textures, most often conveyed in passages of seemingly simple dialogue, like this one (though this one is not nearly as subtle as the rest of the book — the outburst by the grandmother is a moment of vulnerability that most often is covered up):
“I couldn’t sleep,” Grandmother said, “and I got to thinking about sad things.” She sat up in bed and reached for her cigarettes. Sophia handed her the matches automatically, but she was thinking about other things.
“You’ve got two blankets, don’t you?” Sophia said.
“I mean it all seems to shrink up and glide away,” Grandmother said. “And things that were a lot of fun don’t mean anything any more. It makes me feel cheated, like what was the point? At least you ought to be able to talk about it.”
Sophia was getting cold again. They had let her sleep in a tent, even though she was too little to sleep in a tent. None of them knew what it was like, and they had just let her sleep in the ravine all by herself. “Oh is that so?” she said angrily. “What do you mean it’s no fun?”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Grandmother said. “All I said was that when you’re as old as I am, there are a lot of things you can’t do any more . . .”
“That’s not true! You do everything. You do the same things I do!”
“Wait a minute!” Grandmother said. She was very upset. “I’m not through! I know I do everything. I’ve been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I’ve seen and lived as hard as I could, and it’s been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything’s gliding away from me, and I don’t remember, and I don’t care, and yet now is right when I need it!”
“What don’t you remember?” asked Sophia anxiously.
“What it was like to sleep in a tent!” her Grandmother shouted.
The memories that Sophia is in the process of making this summer are ones that the grandmother is already losing, at once not caring and yet worrying deeply about her apathy.
I’ve now read the three Jansson books that NYRB Classics has published. I hope there are more in the works because as short as they are they contain a lot of life and are three of my favorite books.
Earlier this year, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver won the Best Translated Book Award (my review of the book here). It’s an excellent book, quite wintry, that I highly recommend if you’re feeling too warm this summer (well, I strongly recommend it even if you aren’t). I’m happy to say I liked Jansson’s Fair Play (Rent spel, 1982; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 2007) even more. It’s not necessarily summery, but if you’re feeling a bit chilly, this book will warm you up with its subtle love. Hmm, if I “highly” recommended The True Deceiver, I’d best “strongly” recommend Fair Play.
Fair Play concerns two old women, Jonna and Mari. They are best friends and for years have been happy to limit their society to each other. Each is an artist, and they live on a tiny island on the southern side of Finland; there’s a great line when they’re on the ocean during a fog and worry they’re going to end up in Estonia. When they venture out on it, the sea creates a great atmosphere and emphasizes their solidarity and remoteness. So does the apartment complex the two women live in; one lives on one side, the other lives on the other, but there’s a well tread path through the attic that lies in between.
The book is short — just over 100 pages — and it feels shorter still as it is separated into 17 very short chapters that stand fairly well alone, as much as the relationship’s many layers are revealed in each, whether they are redecorating or sitting down to watch movies.
“Mari,” she said, “are you unhappy that we don’t see people?”
“No, not anymore.”
“That’s good. I mean, if we did see them, what would it be like? Like always, exactly like always. Pointless chatter about inessentials. No composition, no guiding idea. No theme. Isn’t that right? [. . .]“
They’ve been together for a long time and have, so far, survived everything that has stood in the way of their continued friendship, including the time that Jonna shot the island gull:
“Typical,” Jonna said. “Of course you had to be the one to find it. Well, okay, I’m sorry. I shot it.” And she added, “At a hundred meters.”
That quote, besides introducing a long period of silence (they fight like old friends too), shows some of the book’s humor that Jansson injects on the sly in dialogue spoken on the side, the way Jonna and Mari express many of their emotions. In fact, sometimes the turmoil is not expressed at all; rather, we feel their discomfort by the way they look at the room around them.
This turmoil is an integral part of the book. On the one hand, their lives look stable, but in actuality their friendship is threatened from many sides. For one thing, they are getting older. It simply cannot last. Also, despite their age, they still have plans for life that might not include the other person. In each section, there is the potential for separation.
Strangely, despite this, the book is also a testament to stability and solidarity. There is certainly the sense that all will continue on as it has for years, and this too is implied subtly, though, impressively, at the same time the threat is implied.
They waited, but nothing more happened.
I purchased Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver (Den ärliga bedragaren, 1982; tr. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal, 2009) quite some time ago. I heard great things about it and found the cover, featuring art by Jansson herself, very attractive — as I always seem to do with books from NYRB Classics. However, when I pulled the book out in the dead of winter, its opening page made me colder and I put it up. When I pulled it out in the spring, well, again, it made me feel cold. A year later, the book has won the Best Translated Book Award, an award worth following faithfully. Obviously, that was the ticket. Here’s a quick spoiler to my review below: I liked this book so much I’ve since gone out and read the other two Jansson books that NYRB Classics has published — The Summer Book and Fair Play – and I liked them even more.
As I said above, the opening to the book is cold, which is fitting, yes, because it is an early dark winter morning, but also because we are meeting the coldest character, Katri. Katri is 25. She and her brother Mats, who is 15, live in a tiny room above the town’s shop along with the big dog, who has no name. Katri is coldly calculating, tremendously good with numbers, which is a gift of dubious value when she uses similar arithmetic, like an economist, to analyze other aspects of society. Nevertheless, her reputation for analyzing a situation and coming up with a fair, honest solution that adds up is such that many people in town come to her for advice:
Katri’s advice was widely discussed in the village and struck people as correct and very astute. What made it so effective, perhaps, was that she worked on the assumption that every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbors. But people’s sessions with Katri were often followed by an odd sense of shame, which was hard to understand, since she was always fair. Take the case of two families who had been looking sideways at each other for years. Katri helped both save face, but she also articulated their hostility and so fixed it in place for all time.
The advice she gives out matches her perception of the world, which is that it is self-interested and not to be trusted. She believes people’s affairs should be governed without emotion and her method of combatting emotion is through what she considers honesty, even if that honesty isn’t pleasant.
Katri is not satisfied with her and Mats’ situation, so she has a plan to make their lives more comfortable. Anna Aemelin is an older woman who lives alone. A celebrated children’s books artist, famous particularly for her incredible renderings of the forest floor when the snow is gone, she has plenty of money she doesn’t know how to handle, not that she cares. She and Katri are quite different, but both sit on the periphery of society. For Anna it isn’t because she’s cold and honest; rather, it’s her artistic temperament and her success: “she was only fully alive when she devoted herself to her singular ability to draw, and when she drew she was naturally always alone.” We know from the outset that Katri is searching for some way to move in with Anna. To start her goal, she goes to the town messenger and offers to take Anna her mail:
“Are you trying to help?”
“You know I’m not,” Katri said. “I’m doing it entirely for my own sake. Do you trust me or don’t you?”
The messenger, sure that Katri is the most honest person he knows — after all, she admitted right there that she’s delivering for her own purpose — gives Katri the mail, and Katri gets her first glimpse into the home of Anna Aemelin. She doesn’t say anything to Anna, but neither does Katri try to look inconspicuous as she scrutinizes the abode, knowing full well that it all adds up: she and Mats will live her soon.
Naturally she wants a fluffy floor. Carpet or no carpet, it’s all fluffy in here anyway — hot and hairy. Maybe there’s more air upstairs. We’ll have to crack the window at night or Mats won’t be able to sleep.
But there’s much more to the book than this. It is a rather dark character study, bitter yet empathetic. We sense personal demons on every page, even though for the most part the snow is falling in the dark and all appears at peace, or at least empty. As cool and controlled as Katri appears to be, we can feel a deep well of emotion under the surface. For one, she has a deep motherly love for Mats. She’ll do anything to protect him, and that is the main object of her plans to move in with Anna. She also has a deep hatred for the shopkeeper over whose shop she lives. Her objectivity is tested time and again as she claims he’s a swindler, an awful man. Perhaps he is, but we can’t fail to note that Katri hates him because he once loved her. Honestly, I don’t know whether he was dangerously lustful, which is surely what Katri thought, or if he was simply attracted to the woman. He isn’t nice to her, but she humiliates him time and time again. At any rate, her deep hatred of him, and some of the weight it puts on her, becomes apparent when she cleans the room above the shop in preparation for the move to Anna’s:
Katri had scrubbed the room above the storekeeper’s shop, scrubbed it with a kind of painstaking rage, the way women clean when they can’t lash out. She scrubbed away the neighbors’ shamefaced talk about envy and petty favours, she scrubbed away all the black night thoughts, and most of all she scrubbed away the doorway where the storekeeper used to loiter on some pretext, standing in hungry vigilance, waiting for some sign to tell him if he could go on hating or if there was the tiniest little handhold for his lust. The room became as clinically clean and naked as a wave-washed skerry.
Katri’s move to Anna’s happens early on. The bulk of The True Deceiver, this excellent book, deals with Katri’s insinuation into Anna’s contented solitude. The “dreadful Katri” (whom we feel for nonetheless) brings with her too much honesty, that refusal to overlook, which infects the old children’s artist: “Several neighbors passed by, but she didn’t notice their greetings, just wanted to get home, home to the dreadful Katri, to her own altered world which had grown severe but where nothing was wicked and concealed.”
Yes, you’ll need to put on a blanket when you read this book. Spring is late coming.
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